News Apple to allow iPhone multitasking?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/02/04/apple-to-alllow-iphone-multitasking/1

With the "Push Notification" functionality delayed, Apple is expected to announce that background tasks will be allowed on the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms for the first time.

 

are they trying competing with Palm Pre? but then, it's a rumour, so i won't trust it.

in the mean time, if you want multi-tasking, just Jailbreak your iPhone and download use Cydia to get "Background". it's a neat code insertion app that allows all other app to go into suspend mode (when you sleep your phone while the app is running) by pressing Home button for 3 seconds.

i want Palringo (IM app), Last.fm, mBoxMail (Hotmail thing that works just like normal mail app, without paying Hotmail), AutoWiFi (so don't have to launch it every time i go to a hotspot) and iMob Online to be able to run in the background.

i don't think iPhone has that much memory though. SBsettings is a toggle and launcher built into the status bar, it can be pulled down by swiping the status bar. this shows free memory of only 20MB when ipod is opened. so where are all the opened app going to fit??

 

S60 devices can do real multitasking and they have 128MB too... then again, they only have half the display resolution.

 

On that note, all Windows Mobile devices can too, usually have more than 128MB RAM and some have double or more the resolution.

How much RAM does the iPod have then? I thought that they were reasonably powerful, with the current gen Touch being the most powerful, though I don't know where I got that idea from.

edit: iPhones have 412MHz ARM 11 processors with 128MB RAM, iPod touch first gen has 400MHz, second has 533MHz and both have 128MB RAM.
The N95 has 128MB RAM - in all versions other than the original one - with either a dual core or two (Wikipedia isn't clear) 332MHz ARM 11 processor
The N96 has dual 264MHz ARM 9 processors with 128MB RAM of which 90MB is free after the operating system is using it.
A Windows Mobile phone, the HTC Touch Pro, has a 528MHz ARM processor and 288MB RAM (I reckon that the OS uses about 100MB of this)
there we go.

 

to realise multi-tasking, Apple needs to decrease the OS footprint. maximum free memory is only around 40MB, and with iPod open in the background, it goes down to 20MB, out of 128MB!

 

It'd be nice if just Gmail had push.

 

Not sure if you're aware, but hotmail opened free pop3 access to all accounts a few weeks ago.

 

Shouldn't they be adding MMS support before getting the apps that they have already running in the background...

 

oh? no, i didn't know. i already spent money on that MBox App. damn it

 

You do need SSL for the incoming and TLS/SSL for outgoing - not sure whether you can do that on the iPhone.

Settings:
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

 

Seems more likely that Apple will just get the push component up and give access to those tasks they want to allow to run in the background. This gives them better over all control of the user experience. So, you may never be able to run XYZ audio stream in the background but you will be able to tell the Apple background audio task (ipod) to play content streamed from XYZ.

Apple is about user experience and protecting users from themselves.